NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
Global Fine Arts Awards 2015
2015
A Utopian Stage at Whitechapel Gallery (2015) received the Global Fine Arts Awards’ nomination for Best Exhibition (Alternative category).
Selected Press (Archive)
Frieze
The 4th Dhaka Art Summit
February 2018
A world away, ‘A Utopian Stage’, curated by Vali Mahlouji and his archival project Archaeology of the Final Decade, revisits the Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis, which took place in Iran every summer between 1967 and 1977. Looking equally to the avant-garde and the classical, East and West, the festival was guided by high modernist aspirations to radical democracy between art forms and solidarity between peoples. Amongst myriad others, John Cage performed there, as did Ravi Shankar, Iannis Xenakis and the Iranian santur virtuoso Faramarz Payvar; Peter Brook staged plays, Dariush Mehrjui premiered films, Sardono Kusumo presented Javanese masked dances. In one of my favourite moments of the whole summit, a programme for the 1972 festival lists the day’s cinema programme: West Side Story, Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Theatre and Dance from Africa. In 1977, the event was shut down by religious decree; the documentation and ephemera that Mahlouji has tracked down and exhibits here remain banned in Iran. That the festival, and the cosmopolitan but autocratic regime of the Shah that supported it, might have, in fact, spurred the rise of the religious fundamentalism that brought about its downfall is the unaddressed subtext here. And, for all talk of the dialogue between ‘ritualizing modernists and modernizing nativists’, to quote Mahlouji’s brilliant phrase, it remains pretty clear which is which. That this show captured my imagination in a way that the more didactic presentations did not is perhaps because I was already familiar with the festival’s cast of characters; it makes sense to my Western eyes. (How to see from somewhere else? That, in essence, is the work of decolonizing.) Still, I understood ‘A Utopian Stage’ as an invitation: instead of telling us how things are, it was an open call to imagine how they might yet be.
Recreating the Citadel at Tate Modern
August 2017
Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) is delighted to announce the opening of a room dedicated to Recreating the Citadel: Prostitute (1975-77) at Tate Modern, featuring Kaveh Golestan’s photographic work alongside research materials uncovered by AOTFD. Following the recent acquisition of these materials by the museum, they will be displayed in parallel for the next twelve months within the museum’s permanent collection. The display marks the first time in the museum’s history that a room of the permanent collection has been dedicated to an Iranian artist.
Tate’s recent acquisition of twenty vintage prints from Golestan’s Prostitute series comes on the back of recent travelling exhibitions of Recreating the Citadel, curated by AOTFD, at Foam Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (Rome), and Photo London (Somerset House). Tate’s acquisition follows similar purchases of Golestan’s work by Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Founded by Vali Mahlouji in 2010, Archaeology of the Final Decade is a curatorial and educational platform which identifies, investigates and re-circulates significant cultural and artistic materials that have remained obscure, under-exposed, endangered, or in some instances destroyed. A core aim of AOTFD is the reintegration of these materials into cultural memory, counteracting the damages of censorship and historical erasure.
Art Dubai Modern Advisory Committee
July 2017
Art Dubai will see two new developments in its Modern section this year. For the first time, the fair will accept group exhibits in addition to solo- and two-artist presentations within Art Dubai Modern, allowing for a wider, comprehensive and deeper reading of art production in the 20th century in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. In so doing, Art Dubai Modern will present a greater diversity and tighter curatorial proposals.
Art Dubai is also delighted that independent curator and art advisor Vali Mahlouji will join a renowned group of art historians and curators on the Advisory Committee for Art Dubai Modern, currently including Iftikhar Dadi, Nada Shabout and Catherine David.
Artforum
Counter Cultures
Negar Azimi, October 2014
“Iran as captured in the ‘Final Decade’ display was worldly and engaged. Journals such as Ketab-e Jom’eh (Friday Book) and Ketab-e Hafteh (Weekly Book) carried modern poetry in translation and accounts of the coming third-world revolution. Also assembled here, the works of the caricaturist Ardeshir Mohasses— X-rays of Iranian society that are by turns droll and tragic—were especially worth lingering over, as was the room devoted to Kaveh Golestan’s Shahr-e No (New City) 1975–77, a project consisting of the late photog- rapher’s reportage on a shabby red-light district that would eventually burn to the ground in a mysterious fire in the first days of the revolution. Assembled along with research documentation about the neighborhood were portraits of prostitutes in half-lit caves, their gazes alternately plaintive, smoldering, angry, and despairing.”